Category Archives: Daily Logs

I’m learning about python packaging, and I think I just expected to Do A Google, copy a few commands, and be on my way. This is because I was wrong, which is both disappointing and awesome: turns out I get to learn a lot more than I thought I was going to!

It’s Monday, and it’s not a holiday, and I’m not at the Recurse Center, and that’s strange, but it’s also such a clear marker of change. This, too, is a new chapter. Just a tiny one, a single week long. This is that week where New York still feels familiar, still feels like home, even though I’m not doing the thing that I came here to do, because I already succeeded at that.

This still sounds a little funny to me. Not strange, just funny. I started a thing with a cohort of people, and I finished it.

Maybe this is unremarkable to you. You went to college, a lot of you, right after high school, for a lot of you, and you went to classes and you made friends and you got grades and then you got the fancy paper that, despite the fact that it is NOT shaped like a key, opens a lot of doors both obvious and invisible.

I, too, went to college right after high school. I went to a strange little place on a hill that felt, for all its 3000 miles from my place of birth, like home. But things happened (long story short: at 19, I was not great at setting boundaries or doing anything that at ALL resembled conflict), I took a break, and I never went back. I moved back home, was a disaster, finally cared enough about not caring, and started making a plan.

I took a class at a time while working full time at a natural foods store, checking off the boxes on Bastyr University’s prerequisites (for the Herbal Sciences degree). I finished all of them, then moved to France. Because Reasons, as we say here on the internet, I did not apply to Bastyr in the end. I did not end up returning to the Pacific Northwest for a few months after my French contract ended.

When I returned, I ended up in Portland because of my incredible family. My amazing older sister Inara said, “hey, if you want to do the figuring-out-the-next-chapter thing but not living-with-your-parents-in-your-twenties, we’d love to have you in Portland for a bit, and I think you’d really like Portland.”

14 months later, I had both a job AND a real non-college apartment with a friend. The desperate longing for France had subsided as soon as I got to Portland, and not a moment sooner, to my profound relief.

From there, from 2008, it’s all been tweaking and tuning.

There is something very liberating and very lonely about doing things on your own all the time, though. People have helped me, to be clear. And I have had the good fortune to be part of incredible communities. But there is never a sense of completion unless I quit something. This is not satisfying.

But ah! Then there was RC.

I heard about RC a couple years ago, when it was Hacker School. A friend who made the amazing helper-robot mural in the library nook was there. (I didn’t quite understand what she was doing, but she was enthusiastic about it!) And I knew someone very bright who applied and didn’t get in. And every conference talk I have seen by a Recurser is sharp, interesting, joyful.

This all made me feel like the following was true about RC:

Incredible people go there, and

People who go there tend to be incredible

Even really smart people don’t always get in, and

I am not all that remarkable, so

Probably I would not get in if I applied

Spoiler alert: I was wrong. I enjoy being right, and usually am (I’m serious!), but I also love learning when I am wrong, because it’s usually not the worst thing ever, and then I know more things. And I LOVE knowing things.

A number of circumstances conspired to get me here, and here’s how I’ve been describing it to folks: I finally got scared enough that doing nothing was no longer the easiest option, and I knew that I would regret it forever if I didn’t just find out what happened if I applied. If I was right, and I wasn’t accepted, then at least I knew what would happen.

Post continues below the line, on Wednesday, so you can think of the line like a time machine. Remember your lines, and also your time machine.

So I got in, and then I had a new problem, which was “how do I move to New York in a month?” My profoundly supportive partner and I talked about it, and decided that he’d come along as well, and so we drove ourselves and our bikes and some other things across the country and started this summer adventure we’ve had.

I’d like to write a more “about RC” post soon (a “return statement,” if you will), but it is clear to me already that everything is subtly and yet profoundly different.

I’m less afraid, for one. I know that I can succeed at something that isn’t open-ended in a timescale way (my 750words.com streak has taught me that I can commit to something for a long period of time, but there’s no end date there). And I am never going to be alone again in my quest for learning.

<3,
Liene, Summer 2 Recurse Center alumna

p.s. For the curious and thorough, you can find ALL my Recurse Center posts under the “recurse center” tag here. Each week has its own tag, too. Things at least marginally related to Actual Computer Programming are under the category Programming (which is most, but not all, days), and also the tag Learning. The difference between the latter two is due to a secret algorithm in my head that I still haven’t pinned down.

All my daily updates are under the Daily Logs category (including the aforementioned programming-heavy days, as well as ruminations on grief, productivity, and more).

But instead I’ve been talking with people, attending Alicia’s awesome code dojo (we round-robin paired on a Flask app for Abstract Salad Factory, which is where everyone brings an ingredient for salad, and then everyone shares the ingredients, and makes whatever salad they like from those things), and not exactly ever making it out the door to have lunch. (That’s what trail mix is for!)

Also went to Madelyn’s awesome short presentation on “how not to be disrespected,” which, one, was a great presentation anyway, and TWO, Madelyn has such incredible presentation & comedy skills that it was ALSO an absolute blast.

And now somehow it’s five, and I still haven’t heard back from the Latvian embassy, and I’m going to go talk to Sonali and Nancy about JOBS STUFF, and then there are presentations, and THEN there’s our end-of-batch party, and we are dressing up like programming languages. So. This is going to be pretty fun.

I will reflect more on all this soon, for whatever definition of “soon” ends up being right.

Leaned more heavily in to spending time with people. Coffee-walk check-in is the best. Went costume-questing with Alicia and Shad, who are both clever AND a lot of fun. (Our end-of-batch party is Thursday, and it’s a costume party, and the theme is programming languages…) This also took us to an art store, which was fabulous.

Had another soba-licious lunch (two days in a row!), this time with Allie. Hooray Corcoron. Also, dip soba is a thing! You get noodles, and something hot to dip them in, and a separate dish to hold them over as you eat them. It’s amazing. It is another form of “yes, adults, it is okay for you to play with your food.” And then you get soba broth (soba-yu) to pour INTO the hot noodle liquid so you can drink it, because it is full of All The Healthful Things. Okay!

I am sure I did some programming things, but I don’t think I did all that many, and that is okay.

Also made two Annoying Adulthood Phone Calls (I warmed up with a call to my dad, partly to ask about one of the things, and partly because it was a phone call that didn’t scare me).

I called the Latvian embassy (I got the voicemail — all in Latvian — and left a message in English, ending with “Paldies” [thank you in Latvian]. Woulda done Latvian if I knew it!). My brother, my sister, my dad, and I all applied for citizenship last year, and got it, but I have to go to Washington, DC (where the embassy is) in person to do the passport application. Which, ugh. I thought it would be So Easy to do that this summer, and it turns out this was not the case. So now I’m trying to get it done next week. And if worse comes to worst, I’ll take a plane trip soon, and whatever. But I’d rather not. A little train trip would be so much nicer.

I ALSO called the health insurance broker to finally resolve this insurance gap of mine. Since I’m on leave from my old job, and thus not working, my coverage through them ended at the end of July. But that’s a qualifying event, so there’s a special 60-day open enrollment period. You may notice that it’s almost 60 days later. But I did it! I called. And left ANOTHER voicemail. And the very nice broker returned my call, and I had to talk to her for a long time, but now I’m enrolled and I just have to give an insurance company money soon. And then, if anything horrible happens, at least I will not be All The Bankrupt. Just, like, out of savings. Hooray American healthcare. Hork. I’m not in any particular rush, but it will be cool to have a regular adult job with a paycheck and health insurance and stuff again. More energy left over to do awesome things.

Not enough sleep, but what a good opportunity to finally try my first “flat white,” which if I remember correctly, Ann described as “like a latte with less milk.” And it’s got almond milk. And it’s delicious and small. And it’s also not a second iced coffee before 11:00.

There’s so much I want to be working on, but also I should probably be working on my niceties for my batchlings. There’s a tradition (of unknown age, to me) of putting together things with little nice things about all the never-graduating people, and they’re due Wednesday morning (tomorrow!), and they took me WAY longer than I expected last time. Mostly this is because I actively admire a lot of people here, and sometimes it’s tricky to verbalize a feeling.

What else did I do this day? (I’m finishing this Thursday morning, and reminding myself why I’ve written these on the days they applied to.) I did some more PostgreSQL (or however that’s capitalized) study. I got distracted a lot. I had a really good conversation with Liz in the evening about how maybe the last week of one’s batch isn’t so productive on the code front, because it’s the last week that one is around these PEOPLE. I think I’m changing my tack for the rest of the week.

Had good coffee-walk check-in chats with Aagje and Laïs, whose presence(s) I have been enjoying so much. Talked more about why I want to do what I want to do after RC, and although I’m happy to flip the table if need be, I need to give it a shot first.

I have been developing a different kind of patience here, and a big piece of that is that I am no longer willing to throw myself under the bus in the name of patience. I do believe that I had good reasons for doing it before, but I also believe that that was hella destructive, and I’m putting that firmly behind me.

More time with relational database study today! <3 So good. There’s a piece in the code I edited that I don’t quite understand (it looks kiiiinda like a list comprehension, but not quite), but the rest of it makes sense, and ALSO it works:

Learned about the inside guts of SQL injection and input sanitization and cleaning up the results of not-sanitizing.

Working inside of Vagrant is starting to make sense, in pieces. Having switched almost entirely to vim for text-editing, I notice some things missing already when I’m inside mah box (e.g. “where are my line numbers?”). But it’s helping me strengthen the muscle memory of certain commands (e.g. :set nu!).

Also went for some good walks (I have my first pair of non-little-kid Keds and apparently they are Taylor Swift edition?, and I went by the Littlebits store, and I went on soup-quest with Sonali and Nancy).

Our friends have been in town, and tonight’s their last night in town. For maybe the first time our whole batch, there’s no Monday night talk, and I’m kind of relieved, because it means I don’t have to skip out on something.

Kind of terrified that there’s officially less than a week left. Came in kind of late today, but then Fridays are optional, and they have a totally different energy. Successfully biked from new-home without getting lost. Different challenges than the old route. The Williamsburg Bridge is WAY more relentless than the Manhattan Bridge — it just goes up, and up, and up, and up — but it doesn’t have the same “bump bump bump” from separate concrete panels that the Manhattan’s got. You win some, and you scratch your head at some!

To my delight, though, both bridges give me a chance to work hard, and then a chance to just fly. They’re a huge part of why I’m even fonder of my bike than I’ve ever been — not necessarily one of the effects I anticipated from biking here.

Back to relational database partytime today. I took a long meandering lunchbreak in the middle (and went to one of the Buddha Bodai places — they are unrelated but have the exact same name, because New York), and I read historical placards, and I witnessed a really sweet art lesson/collaboration/mentoring? in the park, and I found a really awesome no-dumping sign in Chinatown:

And then I came back the extremely long way (“I’ll just stop in here for a minute” is never just a minute), got back into things, and got into trouble!

Okay, not bad trouble. We’re building a tiny fake forum in this class, and I’d spun it up, and apparently didn’t close out of it all the way in the terminal.

I’m using Vagrant with this virtualbox (which, for the record, is a clever way of ensuring your students have a consistent development environment that is likely to work. nice!). And because version control is the coolest, I tried to check git status. Nope; no git in the vagrant box. So I backed out of the vagrant session and tried again. Weird .pyc files and some vagrant configuration stuff, as far as I could tell, but nothing cool and useful that I could see.

I eventually gave up on this, headed back in with vagrant up, and…welp:

Vagrant cannot forward the specified ports on this VM, since they
would collide with some other application that is already listening
on these ports. The forwarded port to 8000 is already in use
on the host machine.
To fix this, modify your current projects Vagrantfile to use another
port. Example, where '1234' would be replaced by a unique host port:
config.vm.network :forwarded_port, guest: 8000, host: 1234
Sometimes, Vagrant will attempt to auto-correct this for you. In this
case, Vagrant was unable to. This is usually because the guest machine
is in a state which doesn't allow modifying port forwarding.

I can translate:

Um, some computers did computer things. Now there is something undead in your computer. It’s your zombie; you deal with it. I have not been trained to handle zombies; I am — hark! — a mere vagrant.

If you want to fix it on your own, you could muck about with something. Godspeed, yo.

Sometimes, I try to fix this. But no. No trying this time. Because it didn’t work.

I, uh, don’t know what that does (safety alert: don’t run commands you don’t understand, and yes I thought about that when I did this, but it seemed safe enough [famous last words]), but it gave me a line of stuff:

tcp4 0 0 *.8000 *.* LISTEN

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Undeterred, I kept looking through the page. (I’ve been amazed at what good information I’ve found in questions closed as “not within the guidelines” on StackExchange.)

Lo, what cleverness is this?

lsof -i:8000

It is a “list [you know, like ls] open files” command and a FLAG and oh yay, look at this output:

“But Liene,” you say, “that looks like an opportunity to learn about how to override line width in WordPress!” And you would be right. And it is also not my goal right now, so I’m skipping it. (I love this new version of myself.)

If you wanna see it lined up, though, here’s a visual of the same thing from my terminal:

There we go! So clear! Now I’ve got a PID (a process identifier, not the other kind of PID, in case you were wondering). And that’s what I was looking for, so I could use this:

kill -9 <PID>

And voilà. Plugged in 31878 for <PID>, and my vagrant box came right back up (from a full halt, but not needing to download/build anything this time).

I’m thinking it might be cool to learn about what I ran, though.

TO THE PAGES OF MAN (i.e. manpages)

What even is netstat -anp tcp | grep 8000?

So glad you asked.

`Netstat` shows network status.

-a shows the state of allllll the sockets (even ones used by server processes, which seems particularly relevant here, since it’s a server process getting in Vagrant’s way).

-n shows network addresses as numbers, instead of the usual “interpret them and then display them symbolically,” whatever that means.

-p shows statistics about the protocol you are toooootally about to give it, except the manpage version sounds like someone is either tipsy or playing Mad Libs, so. (“Show statistics about protocol, which is either a well-known name for a protocol or an alias for it.”) I’ll grant that it sounds a little more sensible with the formatting in the page-of-man.

That explains what the “tcp” part is for, too! Our friend, the Transmission Control Protocol. I look forward to learning more about tcp stuff later.

The pipe (NOW we’re getting to the stuff I already knew!) | just says “okay okay do the thing before this, but then hang on to the result for juuuuuust a second, because I want you to do something else with it.”

grep says “I want to find something, but in a difficult command-line way”

8000 plays itself in this saga.

That’s all the pieces of the sandwich. But what does the WHOLE sandwich look like?

I want to know some stuff about the network status

and I want to know about ALL the sockets and their states

and please display network addresses as plain ol’ numbers

and I only want to know about tcp stuff; everything else is irrelevant

AND once you have THAT…

I just want things from the above result that contain “8000,” and I don’t care about anything 8000-free, because that is ALSO irrelevant

…okay go!

🍔

YEAH!

Okay and then “lsof” is “list open files” and then there’s the killing command…

“Wait, Liene. What about the flag on lsof?”

…so glad you asked! lsof has a BUNCH of flags. (Check it out, maybe now! Just like, get all “man lsof” with your bad self. Right now! Or maybe later.)

In any case, good ol’ -i is the only one I care about today.

Turns out the info about it is…well, set a -v flag on this one because it is VERBOSE. Ho ho ho, nerd humor!

It, um, “selectsthe listing of files any of whose Internet address matches the address specified in i.If no address isspecified, this option selects the listing of all Internet and x.25 (HP-UX) network files.”

If I’m right, though, that means this command selects the listing of all Internet and whatever-this-other-thing-is network files. So like, just network files.

You can specify any of this stuff, which looks like hieroglyphics but isn’t the worst (also EVERYTHING is optional, which is what the square brackets are for):

[46][protocol][@hostname|hostaddr][:service|port]

First two square-bracket pairs can be completely ignored. Now we have half as many problemsquestions!

I didn’t specify an address in “lsof -i:8000”, or it would have been in the bracket-pair that starts with @ (where we could have used a name OR a numeric internet address in dot form), but instead there was nothing there. That means we can ditch that bracket-pair, too.

And ooh, there at the end! There’s a colon. We skipped the service part (the manpage example is “e.g. smtp”), because it wasn’t relevant, but OMG the port part is SO RELEVANT.

So — agh this is so good — that means that “lsof -i:8000” means “list all open files that have an internet port of 8000.”

CRAP COMPUTERS ARE AMAZING 💖 💞 💻 😍 💗

And then there’s one more, and the manpage for kill isn’t RAD when it comes to finding out what the -9 is about (I scan for flags! by their names! but it turns out this one is found under “-signal_number”), but it’s not awful. -9 just means “KILL (non-catchable, non-ignorable kill).” I don’t know what “non-catchable” means, but I DO know what “non-ignorable” means, so it’s basically like “okay srs this process has to stop RIGHT NOW right now IMMEDIATELY no takebacks.” -9 means BUSINESS.

Also. If you’re ever like, “ugh, I wish my computer were a misandrist,” and you want to feel like it is, just type “man kill” at the command line and watch how quickly it obeys your command. So anyway your computer is probably a misandrist.

We have friends arriving in town, and I could keep doing this all night, but I need to get home. I barely even got to play with Postgres today! But. I learned a lot more about some cool command-line superpowers. And now man-pages are noticeably less scary.

On another note entirely, to my horror, I sat the whole time I was at RC today, which is usually Not My Thing. And it was awesome instead. Well then. Maybe I’ll work on moving around a bit more this coming week.

It’s our last day in the sublet we’ve been loving so much this summer. (All hail Listings Project.) And, finally completing the mission I attempted on the FIRST day of my batch, I successfully walked from Brooklyn Heights all the way to SoHo-ish RC in a beautiful late-summer morning. It was a really clear measuring stick for how 1) the weather has shifted, 2) my comfort navigating here (with a few google-y prompts) has improved dramatically.

I got so, so lost the first day. Where I come from, to find one side of a bridge from land, you just go to the water and walk towards the bridge, usually. New York starts its bridges MUCH, much, much further back. And then there’s the construction, obscuring staircases and more permanent signage. And by the time I arrived here, I was a bit of a mess.

But today? Such a treat. So simple. I’m comfortable jaywalking in front of crowds of NYC cops (whoops), because I have an innate understanding that no one cares.

Had another good coffee quest with our ever-growing check-in group. It was less check-in-y and more walk-y, but I had a few really good check-in-y conversations with folks.

Sat in on some systems design mock interview questions about elevators (neat!) and auto-complete searching (yikes!) with Sam, Jesse, and John (some of my favorite alums). I like that RC provides a way to inch closer to terrifying concepts in whatever way works for you. And today, that was just Being Around People Doing Interview-Type Stuff.

I also did the thing I’ve been threatening to do, and headed back to my Udacity course (intro to relational databases yesssssss).

Updated my VirtualBox, even though my old version said there were “no updates available” (fortunately for me, I know enough about how versioning works). (I had a previous one installed from an A11y project at a Grace Hopper Celebration Open Source Day.)

Installed Vagrant (exciting) and OH MY GOSH running vagrant up is COOL and all except for the part where it took FOREVER to download the box it needed (I think?). By “forever,” I literally mean over half an hour (that timestamp — /t — on my bash prompt came in handy!).

I don’t know if it’s all Udacity courses, or just this one, but the instructor is this kind of joyous nerd with a solid dose of humor. I regularly find myself connecting with weird little things, like this screenshot about “where you’ve been sending your SQL queries on this website”:

which is approximately how I’ve been feeling.

Went to Spring‘s (side note: try googling them without looking at that URL) “yay new office” happy hour with a few other Recursers (all invited by Maia, I think). Realized how much I miss nametags if everyone does not definitely know each other. I also realized (again) how much I love good guacamole. Both are important, right?

Got home not-too-late to new-home (where we’ll be for the next couple weeks) in East Williamsburg, and it’s…the fanciest place that I’ve ever called home, even temporarily. It’s fancy in a calm way, though, with lots of little details to notice.

Went on a supportive-distraction and also “well hey, as long as there’s an event going on” trip to the Birchbox store with a bunch of women from my check-in group. (I LOVE coffee-walk checkins so, so much. One of the highlights of my day. We just, uh, made it last longer today.) Everyone in there was so happy and friendly and themselves-seeming. Surprisingly fun, and I got a free vegan pistachio ice cream cone (!!).

Was also reminded that I want to check out the Littlebits store before we leave. (It was on the way!) Haven’t yet been, but it looks like a blast.

Resolved to do Not The Thing Stressing Me Out, and while I’ve been pretty successful at that today (I almost forgot I also had a Grownup Ball Pit Appointment upstairs today), it does mean that I think I had an ice cream cone for lunch. Whoops.

I do feel a lot calmer, though. There is time enough (probably) for all these things I want to do. (Just maybe not at RC.) And I will not win any prizes by making myself miserable instead of having fun.

Forgot all about coloring club, called it late anyway, and had some good conversations (related to coloring!) about knot theory and programming languages and costume ideas. We ended up on another quest outdoors and got food from a DELICIOUS vegan place I hadn’t tried yet (by Chloe). There exists beet ketchup in the world, and it is beautiful and delicious. Sometimes lunch is at 6 pm, and also artful and nourishing.

Turns out the day was more about people than computers. This feels like a trend, and it worries me, but the worry isn’t so productive. Maybe I can ditch it.

Last night I was up super late, but ended up having a really great evening with a bunch of RC women in a ridiculously nice apartment with a ridiculously nice roof deck (see, for instance, me as a unicorn. Um, the horn is the Empire State Building, by the way).

A photo posted by Liene (@springsandwire) on Sep 14, 2015 at 7:26pm PDT

(And to be clear, the building had a roof deck, not the apartment.)

Afterwards, I also had my first “I’m the only person in RC right now!!!” moment, which was weird and kind of magical. Nearly all the lights were off, except one dim one in a side room, and a constantly fluctuating LED strip that painted faint rainbows on the wall.

Anyway. Today, I mostly had a day where I stressed really hard about not figuring out a path forward with my map things, and it messed up things like “eating food in a calm way,” despite the fabulous lunchtime walk I took, so maybe this isn’t the best way forward for now. I spent a bunch of time coveting soldering irons and other awesome electronics stuff, so maybe I’ll just have to bite the bullet and dive into that soon. Adafruit is SO COOL.

In the evening, I went with Nathan to see Jane McGonigal speak at the New York Public Library, which was amazing and impactful and I made sketchnotes and almost burst into tears when she talked about post-traumatic growth & its effects (also content warning/#tw: ideation-y stats about traumatic brain injuries on the left):